Blue Highways pilot moves Hunts Point produce by boat to East 34th Street, then e-cargo bikes

New York City's push to pull truck freight onto the harbor took a concrete step last week when a 55-year-old boat left Hunts Point with a refrigerated pallet of produce and tied up at East 34th Street for an electric cargo-bike handoff.

Gothamist reporter Liam Quigley rode along Wednesday as U.S. Coastal Service's Blue Highway 1 — a former Long Island Sound car-and-passenger ferry still running on its original diesel engines — loaded squash, bananas, peppers, cucumbers and eggplants into a 20-foot refrigerated container at the Bronx produce markets. About 800 pounds of food made the trip. At the East 34th Street docks, the pallet was transferred to electric cargo bikes for the last mile, Gothamist reported Monday.

From demo runs to weekly service

Empire Clean Cities, which leads a U.S. Department of Energy project on sustainable last-mile delivery, said on Monday that City Harvest, Sharing Excess and Blue Ribbon Fish Co. are among the first food distributors testing the model with U.S. Coastal Service, Net Zero Logistics and Fulpra U.S.

On Oct. 7, Sharing Excess moved rescued produce from the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center to a Greenwich Village pantry by the same boat-to-East-34th-Street path, then onto two Fulpra pedal-assist quad bikes — one with battery-electric refrigeration — Empire Clean Cities said. On Sept. 18, City Harvest moved more than 4,000 pounds of food and beverage from Hunts Point to the Brooklyn Marine Terminal on the U.S. Coastal vessel, according to the same release.

Both demonstrations used Con Agg Global's transloading facility at its port on the Fulton Fish Market campus, which NYCEDC helped open in 2025. Empire Clean Cities said that port is expected to eliminate roughly 1,000 truck trips a month from the South Bronx once fully operational. Project partners are now working to launch a regular weekly delivery service, the release said. NYC DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn and NYCEDC President Anthony Shorris both praised the pilots in statements quoted by Empire Clean Cities.

Bigger Blue Highways plans

Ilana Mayid-Dennis, president of U.S. Coastal Service, told Gothamist the short produce runs are meant to prove a concept that could eventually connect with a larger "blue highway" terminal moving containerized international produce through New York Harbor up to Hunts Point. Gothamist reported that the city's Economic Development Corporation is seeking proposals for a barge service between Red Hook in Brooklyn and Hunts Point that would run at least once a day with capacity for at least 100 containers, possibly starting around 2030.

Mayid-Dennis argued that cutting diesel truck miles would ease asthma and road wear in the South Bronx. "The concept of marine freight is not new," she told Gothamist. "That's how New York City flourished. It's a matter of reclaiming the waterfront."